He should have stopped with the first droplet of blood. He took it from under her jaw. A loving slice, because he loved them all. The white skin opened its mystery and gave him a ruby slipper in miniature. He balanced it on the tip of his index finger, waiting for it to collapse into liquid. It glittered on his calloused skin and refused to turn to blood.Her eyes, emerald, drenched in onyx pupils, found fascination in the wooden beams of the ceiling.He should have stopped with the first droplet of blood, but things like him don’t know how to stop. Things like him surge with indefinable hungry things that have no breaks.He put the knife to her clavicle, trailed the skin to the bone. From the bone, tiny spikes, ivory thorns, pushed themselves through, reaching for his hungry hand. He pulled back,hypnotized, watching bone brambles give birth to blood roses across her shoulders.Her eyes, black like tar, ringed themselves with a corona of emerald. In eclipse, she was silent and immobile.Fear does not dwell in the heart of the murderer. Uncertainty never enters the mind of a killing man.Her wrists were tiny and pliable to the stroking edge of blades. Quick, lightning slashes brought tiny hands exploring the edges of torn veins, tiny hands attached to tiny pixies with sharp teeth and stitching needles. Over and under with mercurial thread they stitched her wounds together and slipped back under into her skin, went back to making stories in her blood cells.Rage began to percolate between his eyebrows where his personal monster wiggled, clawing at his frontal lobe, pushing images into him, exciting him.Bottle of Vodka to his lips, suckling, filling the places where his soul should have stretched.He put the knife between her floating ribs and cut upward to her throat. She was soft and tiny and easy to open, but she didn’t bleed, and she didn’t flinch, her huge eyes shed not a single tear.He moved back as her ribs unfolded outward. He moved back further when pages pushed themselves outward from her spine. Pages leafed with blinding speed. Old pages and new. Blurs of dark in stains, calligraphy pulling from and snapping back into the pages. He felt the wall against his back. He felt his monster silent. He felt fear for the first time in his life.The porcelain girl, nude, and yet fully clothed with shadows, retracted her pupils into the emerald seas of her iris and stopped the leafing pages of her with a delicate touch of fingers.

“Here.” She smiled.The book of bones lay open at the center. Dark hands with sharp claws pushed through the threaded spine, anchored in her hips.

Pressure touched the air. Pushed the man into the wooden wall, where he was held by sideways bent magnetism.Dark hands with deadly claws, in fluted hips pushed, and from the book of her center emerged the Satyr, and he was not happy.Pixies with sharp teeth and sharper stitching needles clung to the mahogany fur covering his legs, their eyes gleaming, anticipating.The man’s monster vacated the space between his eyes and hid in his spinal cord trying to catch a wave of spinal fluid to the base of his spine. Satyr stepped out of the girl, one hoof, two hoof, echoes on wood. His index finger went back and forth and back and forth as he walked toward the man with no soul.Satyr smiled and said, “Our story, she is OUR story.” And leapt. Pixies with sharp teeth went to work, performing reverse acupuncture on the killer. Satyr tore his arms from their sockets and spilt his very human and very boring insides all over the floor.The porcelain girl closed the book back inside her ribcage. Picked the miniature red shoe up from the floor and swallowed it, thinking herself a darker version of Alice in UnderLand. She smiled, willed the brambles back into her clavicles, red rose petals falling into her naked lap, and looked at the quick work her creatures were making of the killer. There was a lot of screaming and a lot of wet sounds, but in the end, all that was left of the man was a red pool with brittle bones shredded like cheese.She smiled and smiled some more as the pixies, done with the man, came to play in her hair and slipped back inside her many pages through her little ears, tickling all the way through the rivers of her blood stream.Satyr, drenched in blood, stood before the only girl who’d ever loved him.She opened her arms.One hoof, two hoof, in echoes, he went to kneel before his girl. Her hands, so tiny, combed organic matter from his hair, flung them into deep corners with deeper shadows.Kneeling, Satyr was eye to eye with his girl, her hands, now cupping his sharp chin. She brushed her lips to his, opened her rose pink mouth, unhinged her jaw, unhinged the bones of her clavicles and breast bone and swallowed him back into the pages of her story, where true history hid itself between her clever words, stitching pieces of itself into the future.